Psychiatry and Mental Hospitals

So mental hospitals and psych wards have been mentioned a few times now. Psychiatry, and mental health in general, can be very delicate subjects for a lot of people, and this delicacy is something I do keep in mind while writing. All the same, though, I want to take a moment to comment more extensively on the prevalence of these topics, and on the tone with which they’re handled in the story. I will note, a priori, that I am an extremely biased source here. I have extensive experience of the mental health system, and my experience has not been good nor normal. I’ll comment on that further later, but I feel I should stress this up front, because it does heavily impact how I write about this topic. Additionally, all of my experience has been in the United States. This kind of information is very hard to really get from the outside of a culture, so I do not know nearly as much about how the system works in Japan. This caveat is significant and likely unavoidable in impact when I’m describing her experiences in Tokyo, particularly with how long ago those were. That said, and with the additional caveat that this note is on the long side, let’s dive in.…

Chapter Sixteen

peppersghostinthemachine: morning. how’s the vixengoth?

I laughed at that nickname. I laughed hard enough that Capinera, who was sitting on the other side of the room reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, was looking over at me curiously. EmeraldKeychain: Okay, vixengoth is pretty good, I’ll have to pass that one along. She’s doing well, and remains insatiable. Also, referencing Pepper’s ghost? Seriously? Also, you’re up early.

I wasn’t. I was up late. Though in my defense, I had caffeine on hand now and was largely nocturnal by preference. Sitting around on a laptop until dawn was pretty standard behavior from me.

peppersghostinthemachine: thank you, thank you, i owe it all to the pernatal toxin exposure. also i haven’t slept.

EmeraldKeychain: Again?

peppersghostinthemachine: yup. i never sleep on christmas eve.…

Chapter Fifteen

“Yes,” I said, eyeing the large man standing behind me warily. “I do mind, but I have a feeling you’re going to do it anyway, so let’s cut to the chase.”

“Great.” His voice sounded distinctly wrong as he said that, an inflection pattern that just didn’t quite work.

He did indeed proceed to sit down, taking the chair Kadir had recently vacated. His movements as he sat were a little off, too, not quite how human bodies moved. Between those and the really unusual size, I would have known he wasn’t human at a glance. I could also feel it, his aura completely lacking the shimmering feeling of humanity and instead consisting of an unpleasantly musky smell and the sound of drunken laughter. But this wasn’t even a convincing enough guise to fool most humans on more than a cursory level.

“So given you’re now sitting down,” I said, as Saori slid her chair over slightly towards me, putting the table between her and the new arrival. “What the fuck do you people want, anyway?”…

Chapter Fourteen

Saori’s car was a disaster.

This was not news. It was, in fact, one of the first things I had noted about her, and it had continued to hold true since. “Saori’s car is a glorious disasterpiece composed of the most bizarre, disturbing, and confusing shit you will have seen today” was just a maxim I had learned about interacting with her. As with most such maxims, it hadn’t taken long for this lesson to sink in.

What I now learned was that this rule applied more extensively than I’d quite realized. She’d had this car less than forty-eight hours, and it was already every bit as strange as the last. She had her usual array, the things that never varied: Emergency gear, medical kit, dice and cards, acetylene cutting torch and sledgehammer, spray paint and rope. Those things were in the car because they were useful, and as a result they stayed there.

But she had also accumulated quite a bit of truly strange shit already. To sit down, I had to move a bag containing about twenty mood rings, a toaster which appeared to be operated by hand-crank, and a plastic box with dozens of restaurant coupons. Being a fool who never seemed to learn, I gave in to curiosity and examined the latter somewhat before putting it in back. All of the coupons were from other cities, I was pretty sure, and it looked at a glance like they were all expired.…

Chapter Thirteen

“Tell me you’ve got something.” I was trying not to sound as desperate as I felt. I wasn’t sure how well it was working.

“You’re in luck.” Toby, for his part, sounded smug. “I’ve got quite a bit, I think. There’s something…odd happening, and I’m pretty sure it’s related to your target.”

“Great, hit me.”

“We’re not playing blackjack,” he told me. “But if you want to lose, we can later. Kinda busy with something else at the moment.”

I sighed, and wondered why everyone I met not only had to be a smartass, they also apparently all learned how from the same style guide. “What did you get, then?”…

Chapter Twelve

Sleep sucked. Sleep sucked hard, with great enthusiasm and impressive creativity. I’d always been prone to nightmares and assorted other issues with sleep, for as long as I could remember. I thought that probably made sense, all things considered. It wasn’t every night or anything, though there were times that it felt like it. But they were frequent, and I’d never really found anything that helped. I’d tried a wide array of medications when I was younger, along with every kind of meditation, sleep hygiene pattern, and lifehack I could come up with.

None of it had ever done much. The nightmares still happened, with about the same frequency, severity, and surrealism regardless of what interventions I had tried, until eventually I gave up on preventing them and focused more on just making the surrounding experiences tolerable, adding various sensory comforts. I mostly didn’t have those here, but Raincloud was helpful with that; an actual dog was often better for tactile comfort than a plush one.

But the nightmares themselves hadn’t gotten any better, and this was a bad one. It was dark, and I was lost, and there was something else in the darkness with me. I didn’t know what it was, and I had no idea where it was at all. But it was harrying me, sometimes just a menacing unseen presence, other times suddenly closing in and tearing at me with long, vicious claws.…